Roles in Project Management

A project brings together people with different responsibilities. The figure shows the roles that contribute to project management.

Open Full-Size Diagram ↗

Project Manager

The project manager manages the entire project to meet its objectives. The role calls for project management knowledge, interpersonal skills, and leadership. The project manager oversees the project and may have separate resource owners to work with. Technical expertise is optional.

Initiate and Plan the Project

• Join the project no later than initiation and help write the project charter.
• Select appropriate processes for the project.
• Identify and analyze constraints and assumptions.
• Lead and direct planning.
• Identify dependencies between activities.
• Address unrealistic schedule requirements and produce a realistic schedule.
• Identify the required level of quality and deliver it.
• Define the project change management plan.
• Develop time and cost reserves.

Lead the Team and Work with Stakeholders

• Shape the team’s working environment. Promote good communication, shield the team from office politics, make the most of cultural differences, and resolve team issues.
• Ensure that team members and other stakeholders interact professionally.
• Coordinate interactions between the project and key stakeholders.
• Understand and enforce professional and social responsibility.
• Support the team and other stakeholders during execution.
• Keep the team focused on risk management and possible responses.

Control and Close the Project

• Maintain control by measuring performance against the plan and identifying variances.
• Use metrics to spot variances and trends. Work with team members to resolve departures from the project management plan.
• Determine when a change request is needed, including recommended corrective actions, preventive actions, and defect repairs. Approve or reject requests within your authority, or submit them to the change control board.
• Say no when necessary.
• Spend more time anticipating and preventing problems than reacting to them.
• Close each phase and the project as a whole.

The project manager must have the authority and accountability to perform the role and is accountable for project success or failure. The project manager alone can integrate the project components into a whole that meets the customer’s needs and performs or delegates most project management activities.

Program Manager

The program manager coordinates, supports, and guides related projects so the program can meet both project and program goals. Responsibilities can include:

• Manage related projects together to achieve results beyond what each could achieve independently.
• Make sure selected projects support the organization’s strategic goals.
• Oversee projects and adjust them for the program’s benefit.
• Guide and support individual project managers.

Product Manager

The product manager focuses on strategy and meeting market requirements.

• Study market needs and identify current opportunities and threats.
• Explore opportunities and reduce threats to help the organization succeed.
• Monitor how existing products perform and keep track of competitors’ products.
• Play an important role in launching new products based on market research.
• Serve as a sounding board for the operations team when it considers ending production of underperforming products.
• Take responsibility for product performance in the market.

Service Manager

The service manager is primarily responsible for delivering a service for a given product or service offering.

• Monitor the overall performance of the service area.
• Identify and track performance metrics.
• Maintain relationships with IT, business partners, and other teams.
• Take responsibility for the team’s performance in the service area.

Product Quality Manager

The product quality manager is primarily responsible for product quality.

• Identify the critical parameters or measures that can cause the product to fail in use.
• Design and put product audits in place. The audit may define how many products to sample, how to conduct the audit, and how to select, train, and calibrate auditors.
• Set up a way to track and monitor product quality performance.

Process Requirements Analyst

The process requirements analyst works with the project or product manager to gather, analyze, document, and validate project needs with stakeholders.

1. Identify stakeholders. Work with the project manager to identify anyone affected by the process, such as the sponsor, management team, process owner, project manager, direct reports, analysts, and users.
2. Define business needs. Capture business, functional, nonfunctional, and user requirements, along with the project’s size and complexity, assumptions, and constraints.
3. Analyze requirements. Identify the customer’s stated and unstated needs. Find requirements that conflict or are unclear and clarify them.
4. Document requirements. Write them clearly, concisely, unambiguously, and completely.
5. Validate and prioritize requirements. Ask stakeholders to validate the documented requirements, then prioritize them.

Sponsor

Before or During Project Initiation

• Act as a stakeholder with requirements the project must meet.
• Champion the project, especially while its concept is taking shape.
• Speak for the project to people unfamiliar with it, including upper management.
• Gather support and secure buy-in throughout the organization.
• Provide funding, the project statement of work, and initial scope information.
• Set milestones, key events, or the project end date when appropriate.
• Decide which constraints take priority.
• Provide information for the project charter and give the project manager the authority it specifies.
• Help organize work into appropriate projects and set priorities among them.
• Encourage stakeholders to finalize high-level requirements and scope.
• Guide the project through approval and formalization, with help from the project manager as needed.

During Planning

• Give the team time to plan.
• Review the work breakdown structure (WBS) when appropriate.
• Supply a list of risks.
• Determine which reports management needs for oversight.
• Provide expert judgment.
• Help evaluate trade-offs when crashing, fast-tracking, or reestimating.
• Approve the final project management plan.

During Execution, Monitoring, and Controlling

• Protect the project from outside influences and changes.
• Enforce quality policies.
• Provide expert judgment.
• Help evaluate trade-offs when the project faces difficulties, during tracking, and when reestimating.
• Resolve conflicts beyond the project manager’s control.
• Approve or reject changes, or authorize a representative to do so.
• Direct a quality assurance review when appropriate.
• Clarify scope questions.
• Work with the project manager to monitor progress.

During Closing

• Provide formal acceptance of deliverables.
• Support the collection of historical records from past projects.

Project Team

The project team carries out the project work. It may help to:

• Identify and involve stakeholders.
• Identify requirements, constraints, and assumptions.
• Create the WBS.
• Break down its assigned work packages into schedule activities.
• Identify dependencies between activities.
• Provide time and cost estimates.
• Participate in risk management.
• Follow the quality and communications plans.
• Help enforce ground rules.
• Carry out the project management plan and complete the work in the project scope statement.
• Attend project team meetings.
• Improve processes.
• Recommend project changes, including corrective actions.

Team members who also take on project management responsibilities are part of the project management team.

Stakeholders as a Group

A stakeholder can influence the project positively or negatively. Stakeholders include customers or users, the project manager and team, the sponsor, program and portfolio managers, the project management office (PMO), functional managers within the organization, and external sellers who provide services or materials.

• Help create the project charter and project scope statement.
• Help develop the project management plan.
• Approve project changes or serve on the change control board.
• Identify constraints and requirements.
• Participate in risk management and potentially own risk responses.

Functional Manager

A functional manager owns and manages the resources of a department, such as IT, engineering, public relations, or marketing. This manager generally directs the technical work of people from the department who are assigned to a project.

The organizational structure determines who directs project staff. In a matrix organization, the functional manager and project manager share that responsibility. In a project-centric organization, the project manager directs all the work. In a functional organization, the functional manager directs all the work. The project manager is responsible for avoiding conflict with the functional manager and coordinating their needs for resources to complete the project work.

• Assign people to the project team and negotiate resource needs with the project manager.
• Tell the project manager about other projects that could affect this one.
• Participate in initial planning until work packages or activities have been assigned.
• Provide subject matter expertise.
• Approve the final schedule during schedule development.
• Approve the final project management plan during plan development.
• Recommend changes, including corrective actions.
• Manage activities in the functional area.
• Help resolve team member performance problems.
• Improve staff utilization.

Portfolio Manager

The portfolio manager provides executive-level governance for the projects or programs in a portfolio. A project’s inclusion depends on its value, potential return on investment, fit with corporate strategy, acceptable level of risk, and other factors critical to organizational success.

• Manage projects or programs that may have little in common.
• Make sure selected projects provide value to the organization.
• Work with senior executives to gather support for individual projects.
• Get the best return from the resources invested.